Expert frames climate change as ethical issue

Author tells Gettysburg audience we must consider the global impacts of national policies

Environmental scientist Donald Brown speaks to the Gettysburg Democracy for America group at Valentine Hall at the Lutheran Theological Seminary on Wednesday. (THE EVENING SUN -- CLARE BECKER)

The media has done a terrible job covering climate change: It hasn't focused on the right issues and it has failed to correctly present scientific evidence.

Or at least that is how Donald Brown, a climate-change ethics expert, sees it.

Brown is the author of "The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change" and has been involved in the climate change debate for the past 20 years, once serving as program manager for the United Nations Organizations at the U.S Environmental Protection Agency.

Brown's main problem with the national discussion around climate change is that it has failed to recognize the many ethical and moral issues that go along with it. Climate change is an ethical issue, he told an audience at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg on Wednesday night, because the people causing the problem are not the victims.

The United States is overwhelmingly the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases and yet it is regions like Africa that are already suffering from deadly droughts caused by climate change, Brown said. And yet, he added, the press only looks at climate disasters that happen in the United States.

"U.S. emissions in Pennsylvania are causing floods in other areas," Brown said, but the mainstream environmental movement and the press do not raise awareness of this issue. Instead they operate within the debate framed by those who oppose action on climate change, he said.

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"The victims can do nothing to protect themselves," he said. "The victims can only hope that the people causing the problem will wake up to the fact that they can't decide what to do based on a cost and benefit to them."

The debate in America is also still framed over whether or not there is enough scientific consensus concerning climate change to warrant action, a question, he said, which is itself wracked with ethical problems.

Relying on such a heavy burden of proof might be logical in some circumstances, Brown said, but when the scientific question deals with preventing significant worldwide danger, it might not be ethical to risk human life in the name of absolute scientific certainty.

"I argue that 40 years ago we had enough evidence to have the ability to act," Brown said.

Today the scientific community is overwhelmingly convinced of the realities of global warming, Brown said, reporting with 95 percent confidence that the earth is warming and with 90 percent confidence that it is caused by humans. Still, some politicians claim that there is not enough evidence, even as the earth begins to reach the upper limits of greenhouse gases that it can sustain without causing major temperature increases.

The press and the environmental movement should be focusing more on climate as a global rather than national issue. Not only would this approach be more logical, he said, but it would also be more effective.

This way, "we don't have to figure out what the ethics require," Brown said, "we just have to get people to see the injustice."

Historically, he said, this is a method that has been successful for social movements ranging from civil rights to women's equality.

"We will only solve this problem," he said, "when we have a social movement that demonizes the unjustifiable use of energy."